Paul Polson was born and raised in Wyoming, where the geological world around him — its layered rock, stacked sediment, and visible time — became the conceptual core of a painting practice that has continued for more than fifty years. He received his BA in Art Education from the University of Wyoming in 1970, then moved to San Diego, where he spent fifteen years as a studio artist, organized figure drawing classes, and did graduate work at San Diego State and the University of California San Diego. In 1982 he entered the inflatable sculpture industry, and by 1983 found himself at the center of a large-scale public art commission — an inflatable King Kong for the Empire State Building marking the film’s 50th anniversary. That opened two decades of work building giant inflatable sculptures and scenic sets through his company Big Air Productions, Inc., with clients including Cirque du Soleil, Radio City, the Broadway production of Cats, the Macy’s Day Parade, and Disney.
In 1988 he moved to Pioneer Square in Seattle, painted in a warehouse for three years, then relocated to Poulsbo and the Kitsap Peninsula, where he lived and worked for over twenty years. In 2018 he settled in Astoria, Oregon, arriving with 2,000 pieces of artwork and a desire for a fresh landscape. He found it on the Oregon coast. His ongoing Strata series — begun in Wyoming and developed across every place he has lived — treats landscape as geological cross-section: stacked histories, core samples of human existence over time, the deep record of place made visible in paint. His brushstroke has a “staccato rhythm,” alternating thick and thin applications for a tactile surface that holds both the geological weight of the concept and the immediacy of direct observation.
In Three Sisters’ Oregon Coast, The composition divides sharply at the horizon line, with raw sienna and burnt umber dominating the rocky foreground while cerulean and white clouds occupy nearly two-thirds of the canvas above. Three isolated rock stacks, their shadowed faces rendered in umber and olive, rise from a shallow tidal flat where individual stones are rendered with deliberate flatness—the paint applied in discrete patches rather than modeled, creating a patchwork effect that fights against atmospheric recession. A dead tree with spindly branches crowns the central stack like a skeletal afterthought, while the distant lake and mountains recede into cooler greens and grays. The painting's real friction lies in its competing impulses: the foreground insists on tactile, almost naive detail work, while the sky and background surrender to softer, more conventional landscape painting, as if two different hands—or two different moments in the artist's development—are visible in a single frame. Saddle Mountain works from a similar method: Polson divides his composition into strict horizontal bands—burnt sienna foreground, dark marsh grasses rendered in thin vertical strokes, a steel-blue water plane, distant evergreens in olive-green, and mountains in cool blue-gray that peak off-center. The painting's spatial recession relies entirely on atmospheric perspective rather than linear depth; the pilings and grasses occupy the same plane, creating a flattened, almost collaged effect that fights against naturalistic distance. The artist's brushwork shifts abruptly between the careful architectural rendering of the wooden posts and the loose, gestural handling of the sky, suggesting an unresolved tension between documentary precision and landscape mood. What emerges is less a coherent view than a stacked inventory of Pacific Northwest elements—one senses the artist assembling parts rather than observing a unified scene. The most unexpected works at JG are the industrial pieces. In Copper Pipe and Meter, Actual copper piping and brass fittings are adhered directly to the canvas surface, creating a literal plumbing schematic rendered in oxidized browns, pale ochres, and touched with verdigris greens against a mauve-pink ground. The composition divides the canvas into a vertical stack of functional zones—a pressure gauge with white face sits left of center in the lower third, while ball valves (painted black) punctuate the pipes at regular intervals like mechanical joints. The paint layer builds thickly around these embedded objects, creating shadow and dimension through impasto that mimics the dimensionality of the actual hardware, collapsing the distinction between representation and material fact. The work trades in plumber's literalism without irony, suggesting that industrial infrastructure deserves the same formal attention as landscape or still life. He has exhibited at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art and the Hoffman Center for the Arts in Manzanita, and has lectured at the University of Washington, Northwest College of Art & Design, West Sound Academy, and Northwind Arts Center in Port Townsend.
Producing art has always been a loving process. Like a scientist in a laboratory, I paint with a purpose to grow, delve into my mind and experiment with my medium. I like to feel every place I go — I learn from it.
